When comparing Moai SDK vs SFML, the Slant community recommends Moai SDK for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”Moai SDK is ranked 21st while SFML is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Moai SDK is:

Pros

Pro

Fast

Pro

Gives you total control

You can use your own custom shaders and extend the language with C++. MOAI doesn't give you everything, instead it gives you the tools you need to develop any game you want.

Pro

Full source code is available

So it is extendable with C++

Pro

Easy-to-use particle engine

Uses a limited subset of Lua

Pro

Uses Lua, with LuaJIT where possible

Pro

Is used by many pro developers

Moai SDK is used by popular developers including Double Fine for their mobile game, Middle Manager of Justice, and for their Kickstarter hit, Broken Age(formerly, Double Fine Adventure.) It was also used to create the popular mobile game Bubble Ball 2.This proves that this engine can be used to make fully-featured and fun games.

Pro

API interfaces

Has options for development like Hanappe and Rapanui, providing a different way to interact with the engine.

Pro

Helpful community

The Moai SDK Forum is active and users will go to great extents to answer queries, post code snippets, beta test, and even purchase and give feedback on each others' games.

Pro

Helpful and detailed documentation

Although the Moai SDK is very advanced and uses complicated features, the documentation wiki thoroughly and clearly explains how to use these features, such as the Moai Cloud(a service that provides web services for your game), and multiple ways to build from source.

Pro

zlib/PNG license

In short, SFML is free for any use (commercial or personal, proprietary or open-source). You can use SFML in your project without any restriction. You can even omit to mention that you use SFML -- although it would be appreciated.

Pro

Can be combined with OpenGL

If you hate something about the way SFML handles graphics, you can just combine it with OpenGL. It's completely smooth and works as expected, without any additional dependencies.

Pro

Active community and wiki

You can ask questions on their own personal forum which is full of users, and their wiki is constantly being maintained. They even have an IRC

Pro

Works on every platform

SFML 2.2 brought forth Android & iOS functionality, and SFML games work on Linux, Mac and Windows out of the box, since SFML is written with OpenGL.

Pro

Great documentation

SFML is very well documented, even with short examples of use for many functions and modules. Furthermore, there are books like 'SFML essentials' and 'SFML for game development' which teach you how to use this library to its fullest.

Pro

Good for OpenGL

If you are thinking about using OpenGL, look no further, you can open a window, and handle events in less than 15 lines, and it provides input, time, and even networking, plus alot more. It has become my favorite c++ library :D

Pro

Great library

SFML is a collection of modular, well designed libraries you can implement an engine or game on top of. The API provides tons of good documentation and is very straightforward to use. You can get a game up and running with SFML quite quickly and with minimal effort.

Pro

Clean code

An SFML project's code-base is usually clean and easy to read. All public SFML classes are under the namespace "sf" so it is easy to tell which code is yours and which belongs to SFML (of course you can stop this by typing using namespace sf;).

Pro

Beginner-friendly

SFML is extremely beginner friendly and even provides pre-built libraries for your IDE of choice on Windows. Besides the fact that it's extremely well documented, they also have a set of tutorials that walk you through every module.

Pro

Modern C++11 implementation

SFML is one of the few good C++ frameworks out there to actually make full use of the language. It's extremely well optimized and it plays well with anything you throw at it.

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Cons

Con

Not for beginning developers

The Moai SDK has very advanced features which allow it to create powerful games. A drawback from this is that it is not very suitable for beginners.

Con

Not necessarily tested or stable

Con

Scarce documentation

Since it is a minimalist framework there is not that much documentation, but if you are used to reading API references and source code you are good to go!

Con

Development has ceased

The last update was over a year ago. Users should not expect things to still work on future OS versions unless they're ready to fix them yourself.

Con

No GUI editor or IDE

Does not include any IDE or media editor. It's purely source code.

Con

Messy sprite management

Sprites retain all of the operations applied to them, whether that be a new position or a rotation. This makes sprite management somewhat annoying.

Con

Not specifically a 2D game engine

It isn't really an engine, more of a collection of modular, well designed libraries you can implement an engine or game on top of.

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